City of High Point’s experience with bid-to-goal project – round III

After being initially contacted by private vendors offering to provide proposals for operations of the City’s wastewater facilities, the City of High Point chose to remain in strong support of continued public control and adopted a new approach, Bid-to-GoalSM, to achieve a competitive level of operation. To date, six Divisions of the City have signed their Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) proposing to operate in an efficient, business-like manner without sacrificing the quality of service. Each MOU preparation stage was involved in establishing budgets based on previous expenditures, developing optimization strategies to create cost savings by a project team. Since 1999, the approach has proven to work for both the employees and the City, resulting in over $8 million of operating budget savings and a renewed culture for competitive utility operations.